Choices Not Based On Who Can Succeed

August 20, 2000|By HELEN THOMAS Hearst Newspapers

LOS ANGELES — Suddenly the role of the vice president in the November election has gotten everyone's attention.

That's because the American electoral system has this odd quirk: It empowers one man to pick a possible future U.S. president. The presidential candidate doesn't ask the American voters or the Electoral College when he -- or, she (someday) -- selects a running mate who may become president as a result of the death or removal of the president. That's the way the system works and no one has thought of a better way.

Vice presidential succession isn't a far-fetched prospect. Since I've been reporting on the Washington scene, three vice presidents have become president through the succession process: Harry Truman in 1945, when President Franklin D. Roosevelt suffered a fatal stroke; Lyndon B. Johnson in 1963, when John F. Kennedy was assassinated; and Gerald R. Ford in 1974, when Richard Nixon was forced to resign amid the Watergate scandal.

That's why it's startling that both Vice President Al Gore and Texas Gov. George W. Bush picked their running mates for defensive political reasons -- not necessarily because Gore and Bush thought their vice presidential nominees would make the best presidents if the need arose.

Gore's pick of Sen. Joseph Lieberman of Connecticut apparently was based on the senator's biggest claim to fame -- his withering denunciation of President Clinton in 1998 when he branded his affair with former White House intern Monica Lewinsky as "immoral" and harmful to the nation's children. With Lieberman at his side, Gore hopes to blunt the Republican litany that Bush would restore "dignity and honor," and oh, yes, "decency" to the Oval Office.

So Lieberman, the stern moralist, joins the ticket as the voice of righteousness, even though he and Gore have parted company in the past on such issues as school vouchers and privatizing Social Security. Lately, Lieberman has had a change of heart on school vouchers.

Bush, on the other hand, a johnny-come-lately in national politics, was looking for "gravitas" in his running mate to counter the perception that he lacks experience in domestic or foreign affairs.

So he chooses Richard Cheney, the low-key former White House chief of staff, six-term Wyoming congressman, secretary of defense during the Persian Gulf War and, most recently, an oil industry tycoon.

Once fellow Republicans and the media took a look at Cheney's voting record in the House, they were shocked. He voted "no" on everything from gun control to making civil rights leader Martin Luther King's birthday a national holiday. His stunning negative votes on social programs displayed a lot of conservatism, but no compassion, conflicting with Bush's political mantra of "compassionate conservatism."

The one-man selection system of vice presidents has actually served the nation well and each successor has risen to the occasion. To this day, no one has matched the sanitized description of the vice presidency as a "warm bucket of spit," which was uttered by John Garner, the vice president in FDR's first two terms.

One of the big surprises in the history of vice presidential choices came at the 1960 Democratic convention in Los Angeles where John F. Kennedy asked Lyndon B. Johnson to be his running mate. At the time, Johnson was Kennedy's chief rival for the presidential nomination.

As rumors spread that Kennedy would offer Johnson the No. 2 spot on the ticket, the Texas delegation, headed by Speaker Sam Rayburn, urged him not to accept it. The Texans were furious with the hard-ball politics being played by the Kennedy clan after Kennedy had the nomination nearly locked up before the convention began.

When Kennedy decided that Johnson was the best man to help the Democratic ticket in the South, he summoned Rayburn to his suite to inform him of his choice. Rayburn balked, telling Kennedy that Johnson would prefer to remain in the Senate as the majority leader.

"What makes you think he will stay in the leadership?" Kennedy asked the speaker. The warning was clear. Rayburn went to Johnson and told him he had to accept Kennedy's offer to be his running mate. Johnson protested, saying, "Yesterday, you told me not to take it. What happened?" Rayburn's classic reply: "I'm a much smarter man today."

Johnson chafed under his loss of political power as vice president. He was even more discomfited by the continual rumors that Bobby Kennedy had started a "dump Johnson" movement to remove him from Kennedy's reelection ticket in 1964. The rest is history.